UF Explore Magazine | Fall 2017

U.S. News & World Report Top 10 Public University

FALL 2017

Korean Connections

Science Informs Art

Fall 2017, Vol. 22, No. 2

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Extracts Research Briefs

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Rekindling Korean Connections Art and science converge at the Harn Museum.

Navigating Old Age

Bernard Brzezinski

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Societal changes impact the geography of aging.

About the cover: UF art curators and doctors used the tools of modern medicine to reveal the secrets of a centuries-old bodhisattva sculpture from Korea.

Students of History

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UF students document one of the nation’s oldest communities as they learn skills that will help it live on.

Dr. Kent Fuchs President Dr. David Norton Vice President for Research

Tracking Irma

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Hurricane Irma provided both opportunities and challenges for UF research.

Board of Trustees James W. Heavener, Chair David L. Brandon Mori Hosseini Leonard H. Johnson Smith Meyers Rahul Patel Marsha D. Powers David Quillen Jason J. Rosenberg Steven M. Scott Robert G. Stern David M. Thomas Anita G. Zucker Explore is published by the UF Office of Research. Opinions expressed do not reflect the official views of the university. Use of trade names implies no endorsement by the University of Florida. Š 2017 University of Florida. explore.research.ufl.edu Editor: Joseph M. Kays joekays@ufl.edu Art Director: Katherine Kinsley-Momberger Design and Illustration: Katherine Kinsley-Momberger Ivan Ramos

Research Assistance

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The Conversation Gut Check

Innovative program helps physicians become researchers.

Writers: Cindy Spence Meghan Meyer Photography: Bernard Brzezinski John Jernigan Mindy Miller Cary Hazlegrove Web Editor: Jewel Midelis Copy Editor: Bruce Mastron Printing: StorterChilds Printing, Gainesville Member of the University Research Magazine Association www.urma.org

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tracts Research Fuels Top 10 Ranking Expenditures are up 25 percent in last decade

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David Norton

Vice President for Research

n September, the University of Florida achieved its long-sought designation as one of the nation’s top 10 public universities, tying for ninth in the 2018 U.S. News & World Report Best Colleges rankings.

“This is a significant milestone that we can all be proud of, and it happened as the result of many years of focused work and a keen sense of purpose,” UF President Kent Fuchs said.

While many factors contributed to this achievement,

U.S. News and World Report 2018 Top Ten Public Universities 1

University of California, Berkeley*

1

University of California, Los Angeles*

3

University of Virginia

4

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

5

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

6

College of William & Mary

7

Georgia Institute of Technology

8

University of California, Santa Barbara

9

University of Florida*

9

University of California, Irvine*

9

University of California, San Diego* * = tie

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the growth in our research enterprise was certainly an important element. Over the past decade research expenditures have climbed nearly 25 percent to last year’s record $791 million, putting UF solidly in the top tier of public research universities nationally.

UF’s annual report to the

National Science Foundation showed that life sciences research, including health and agricultural research, accounted for $561.9 million of the total; engineering research accounted for $94.6 million; and physical sciences such as physics and chemistry accounted for $28.2 million.

Computer and information sciences and math accounted for $19.9 million; geosciences totaled $15.8 million; social sciences totaled $14.7 million; psychology totaled $6.4 million; and non-science and engineering fields such as business, communications and education totaled $49.3 million.

This data illustrates the broad diversity of research underway at UF. Not only is this research helping to cure diseases, feed the world and probe the mysteries of the

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This is a significant

milestone that we can all be proud of, and it happened as the result of many years of focused work and a keen sense

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of purpose.

— Kent Fuchs UF President

universe — it also has a significant economic impact on Florida’s economy.

UF’s quest to become a top 10 public research institution officially began in 2013, when the Legislature passed, and Gov. Rick Scott signed, a bill designating it a preeminent university and providing special funding to be used for helping it reach top status.

UF has since used preeminence funding to hire more than 100 senior leading faculty from all over the world.

Earlier this year, the university announced a plan to increase the faculty by an additional 500 members to continue to increase research excellence and reduce class sizes.

Many new UF researchers have cited the school’s

Hannah Pietrick

exceptional breadth of disciplines and the numerous opportunities for collaboration as a reason for coming to work at the university. UF is one of only six universities in the country with colleges of law, medicine, engineering, agriculture and veterinary medicine on one campus.

Faculty willing to do the hard work of pursuing external grant funding are an important reason why UF is ranked among the best public universities in the United States. Citizens of Florida and beyond and our students here on campus all benefit from the research UF scientists and scholars conduct.

“Our faculty — the core of our academic reputation — and staff deserve tremendous credit for lifting us up to get us here, as do previous leaders, particularly Bernie Machen, and UF’s Board of Trustees,” Fuchs said. “We also owe a huge debt of gratitude to the Legislature, Gov. Rick Scott and the Board of Governors for their continued support to ensure that the nation’s third most-populous state has the world-class university it deserves.”

Doug Soltis and Art Hebard

National Academy of Sciences Inductees Biologist and physicist honored

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wo University of Florida faculty members have been named to the National Academy of Sciences, bringing the number of current and retired National Academies members at UF to 29.

Art Hebard, a distinguished professor of physics, and Doug Soltis, a distinguished professor of biology at the Florida Museum of Natural History at UF, are among 84 new members and 21 foreign associates.

Soltis’ honor comes a year after his wife, Pam, also a plant biologist and distinguished professor and curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History, was named to the National Academy of Sciences and just three weeks after they were named to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

“To have not one but two of our faculty members recognized with such a significant honor at the same time is remarkable. I am so pleased for UF and proud for them,” UF President Kent Fuchs said.

Hebard is known for his research on magnetism, superconductivity, and capacitance in a wide variety of new materials including thin films, graphene, fullerenes, and dilute magnetic semiconductors. He joined UF from AT&T Bell Labs in 1995 and became a distinguished professor in 2007. In recent years, he has received two major awards from the American Physical Society: the 2008 James C. McGroddy Prize for New Materials (for the discovery

of superconductivity in potassium-doped C60) and the 2015 Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Physics Prize (for the discovery of the superconductor-insulator transition in thin films).

Soltis studies plant evolution using modern DNA approaches, including next generation sequencing methods and the use of big data sets that require challenging computational analyses. His specific interests include plant phylogeny, genome doubling (polyploidy), floral evolution, angiosperm diversification and phylogeography.

Those elected this year bring the number of active members to 2,290 and the number of foreign associates to 475.

Foreign associates are nonvoting members of the Academy, with citizenship outside the United States.

The National Academy of Sciences is a private, nonprofit institution that was established under a congressional charter signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863. It recognizes achievement in science by election to membership, and — with the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine — provides science, engineering, and health policy advice to the federal government and other organizations.

Art Hebard, afh@ufl.edu Doug Soltis, dsoltis@ufl.edu

Steve Orlando

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tracts High-Water

HOT SPOTS Study finds sea-level rise greater along Atlantic coast

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hen the Indian River Lagoon on Florida’s Atlantic coast became much saltier after 2011, Arnoldo Valle-Levinson began to investigate.

The University of Florida professor of civil and coastal engineering sciences checked local tidal gauges, revealing that seas in the region were rising nearly 10 times faster than the long-term rate recorded in that region.

When he reviewed tidal data for the entire Eastern Seaboard, he found similar numbers for all the tide gauge stations south of Cape Hatteras, revealing the regional extent of the “hot spot.”

Sea-level rise hot spots — bursts of accelerated sea rise that last three to five years — happen along the U.S. East Coast thanks to a onetwo punch from naturally occurring climate variations, according to a new study led

by Valle-Levinson.

After UF scientists identified the hot spot reaching from Cape Hatteras to Miami, they probed the causes by analyzing tidal and climate data for the U.S. Eastern Seaboard. The study, published online in Geophysical Research Letters, shows that seas rose in the southeastern U.S. between 2011 and 2015 by more than six times the global average sea-level rise that is already happening due to human-induced global warming.

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The study’s findings suggest that future sea-level rise resulting from global warming will also have these hot spot periods superimposed on top of steadily rising seas, said study coauthor Andrea Dutton, assistant professor in UF’s Department of Geological Sciences.

“The important point here is that smooth projections of sea-level rise do not capture this variability, so adverse effects of sea-level rise may occur before they are predicted to happen,” Dutton said. “The entire U.S. Atlantic coastline is vulnerable to these hot spots that may amplify the severity of coastal flooding.”

The combined effects of El Niño (ENSO) and the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), both of which are naturally occurring climate processes, drove the recent hot spot, according to the study. Study authors also discovered similar hot spots at various positions along the U.S. Eastern Seaboard over the past century. They found that these past hot spots are also explained by the combined influence of ENSO and NAO. The finding challenges previous arguments that a hot spot north of Cape Hatteras over the past few decades was due to a slowdown of circulation in the North Atlantic, which is itself due to global warming. Instead, study authors discovered the combination of these two naturally occurring ocean-atmosphere processes explained both the timing and the location of hot spots observed along the entire U.S. Atlantic coast, Dutton said.

While a slowdown of circulation in the North Atlantic can further exacerbate sea-level rise in the Northeast, it does not explain the accelerations observed in the Southeast, and was not required to explain the hot spots observed in the Northeast, according to the study.

The authors found that hot spots observed over the past century were created by the influence of ENSO that affects the amount of water that accumulates in the western portion of the North Atlantic and causes seas to rise along the entire U.S. Atlantic coast. This sea-level rise is then concentrated to the north or south by the NAO, which is a measure of the atmospheric pressure difference between Iceland and the Azores.

Valle-Levinson said hot spots are difficult to predict and it’s not clear if the hot spots will worsen with time. By decreasing emissions, he said, we may be able to stabilize rising seas longterm, but the trend will likely be difficult to reverse.

“It’s amazing to see construction along the East Coast.

That’s the worst place to build anything,” said Valle-Levinson, who described the future for some southeastern U.S. cities as “Venice-like.” “We need to understand that the ocean is coming.”

The study was also co-authored by Jonathan Martin, a UF professor of geological sciences.

Arnoldo Valle-Levinson, arnoldo@ufl.edu

Stephenie Livingston

CRISPR Citrus Gene editing a potential treatment for greening

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n the same year the University of Florida’s Citrus Research and Education Center celebrates its 100th anniversary, Nian Wang believes he may be close to finding the “off switch” for greening, the disease devastating Florida’s multi-billion-dollar-a-year citrus industry.

Wang, an associate professor of microbiology and cell sciences at the UF Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, is working with a relatively new gene-editing technique called CRISPR, an acronym for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.”

Scientists expect to use the CRISPR technique to generate greening-resistant citrus varieties by modifying the susceptibility genes within the plants, he said.

“First, we are working on identifying genes which make citrus susceptible to the greening pathogen,” Wang said.

Scientists know the greening disease as Huanglongbing — or HLB for short. A bacterium known as Candidatus Liberibacter causes the citrus greening disease. Trees and fruit can get infected when the Asian citrus psyllid — a tiny insect no bigger than a grain of rice — bites citrus leaves or stems.

Wang’s system works by tricking plants into sending themselves instructions to cut off the gene sequences that program them to welcome disease into their cells. With CRISPR, he believes he is nearing the genetic “off” switch. Theoretically, this technique could soon create a greening-resistant tree, said Wang, a faculty member UF’s Citrus Research and Education Center in Lake Alfred.

He has already used CRISPR on grapefruit to cope with canker. Wang and his research team used CRISPR to modify the DNA in grapefruit, creating a new variety that is resistant to

citrus canker.

Following that success, the Florida Legislature provided Wang $1 million to use CRISPR to develop citrus varieties that are resistant to citrus greening.

Wang expects to make significant progress on the gene-editing process in the near future.

“This technology can generate greening-resistant and greening-tolerant genomeedited citrus varieties that are free of foreign DNA, and thus can be commercialized immediately,” he said.

Nian Wang, nianwang@ufl.edu

Brad Buck

Artichoke Options IFAS researchers focus on mimicking needed chilling

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rtichokes might grow in Florida’s subtropical climate after all — good news for those who crave the taste and antioxidants of the food crop.

Shinsuke Agehara, a University of Florida assistant professor of horticultural sciences, presented his preliminary findings to the Florida State Horticultural Society summer of 2017. In his talk, he said the Imperial Artichoke shows the most promise of growing in Florida’s warm, humid climate.

Growers will need to use a natural plant hormone called gibberellic acid to maximize growth.

With help from the acid, farmers could produce as much as 6,000 pounds of Imperial Artichoke per

acre, said Agehara, a faculty member at the Gulf Coast Research and Education Center, part of the UF Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. By comparison, California producers can grow up to 13,500 pounds of artichokes per acre.

California grows 99 percent of the nation’s artichokes, which flourish in a cool environment. A warm winter might present an obstacle for Florida growers.

To form buds, artichokes generally require at least 250 to 500 cumulative hours below 50 degrees. Therefore, flowering must be artificially induced to produce artichokes in Florida.

“Chilling is the artificial signal to induce bud development for artichokes,” said

Agehara. “Once we optimize the hormone application rate, I think we can increase the yield closer to the commercial yield in California.”

Last year, Agehara received a $90,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to see if he could grow artichokes at the research center in Balm, Hillsborough County.

Agehara is interested in trying to help Florida farmers grow artichokes because small growers want alternative crops that are attractive and profitable. The retail price of an artichoke can be up to $5, and each plant can produce several buds, he said.

Thus, the production value of artichokes is very high.

Additionally, consumers like artichokes because they’re high in antioxidants and

nutrients, including folate and dietary fiber.

“The appeal of the artichoke in the global food market would be the high antioxidant value, as consumers are becoming more aware of health benefits of ‘functional food’ in recent years,” Agehara said.

Shinsuke Agehara, sagehara@ufl.edu

Brad Buck

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Reassessing

ASPIRIN

New research finds little benefit for atherosclerosis

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or decades, aspirin has been widely used to reduce the risk of cardiovascular problems. Now, a team led by a University of Florida Health researcher has found that aspirin may provide little or no benefit for certain patients who have plaque buildup in their arteries.

Aspirin is effective in treating strokes and heart attacks by reducing blood clots. The researchers tracked the health histories of over 33,000 patients with atherosclerosis — narrowed, hardened arteries — and determined that aspirin is marginally beneficial for those who have had a previous heart attack, stroke

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or other blood-flow issues involving arteries. However, among atherosclerosis patients with no prior heart attack or stroke, aspirin had no apparent benefit. The findings were published in the journal Clinical Cardiology.

Because the findings are observational, further study and clinical trials are needed before definitively declaring that aspirin has little or no effect on certain atherosclerosis patients, said Dr. Anthony Bavry, an associate professor in the UF College of Medicine’s Department of Medicine.

“Aspirin therapy is widely used and embraced by cardiologists and general practitioners around the world. This takes a bit of the luster off the use of aspirin,” Bavry said.

Bavry said the findings do not undercut aspirin’s vital

role in more immediate situations: If a heart attack or stroke is underway or suspected, patients should still take aspirin as a treatment measure.

“The benefit of aspirin is still maintained in acute events like a heart attack or a stroke,” he said.

Among more than 21,000 patients who had a previous heart attack or stroke, researchers found that the risk of subsequent cardiovascular death, heart attack or stroke was marginally lower among aspirin users.

For those atherosclerosis patients who had not experienced a heart attack or stroke, aspirin appeared to have no effect.

The risk of cardiovascular death, heart attack and stroke was 10.7 percent among aspirin users and 10.5 percent for non-users.

Patients who enrolled in the nationwide study were at least 45 years old with coronary artery disease, cerebrovascular disease or peripheral vascular disease. Their medical data were collected between late 2003 and mid-2009.

The researchers did identify one group that got some benefit from aspirin — people who had a coronary bypass or stent but no history of stroke, heart attack or arterial blood-flow condition. Those patients should clearly stay on an aspirin regimen, Bavry said. Bavry said discerning aspirin’s effectiveness for various patients is also important because the medicine can create complications, including gastrointestinal bleeding and, less frequently, bleeding in the brain. Because of insufficient data, the current study wasn’t able to address the extent of aspirin’s role in bleeding cases.

“The cardiology community needs to appreciate that aspirin deserves ongoing study. There are many individuals who may not be deriving a benefit from aspirin. If we can identify those patients and spare them from aspirin, we’re doing a good thing,” he said.

The current findings are the second time this year that Bavry and his collaborators have published research about the apparent ineffectiveness of aspirin therapy. In April, the group showed that the drug may not provide cardiovascular benefits for people with peripheral vascular disease, which causes narrowed arteries and reduced blood flow to the limbs.

Bavry also cautioned patients with atherosclerosis or peripheral vascular disease not to quit aspirin therapy on their own.

Instead, they should discuss the matter with their physician, he said.

Scientists from France, England and Harvard Medical School collaborated on the research. Patient data were derived from The Reduction of Atherothrombosis for Continued Health registry, which was sponsored by the Waksman Foundation and pharmaceutical companies Sanofi and Bristol-Myers Squibb.

Related video, http://bit.ly/2y1cZHb Anthony Bavry bavryaa@medicine.ufl.edu

Doug Bennett

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Pinpointing

PARKINSON’S +

Imaging biomarker eases tracking of disease

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It’s been 200 years since the behavioral symptoms of Parkinson’s disease have been described, and we still use symptoms in testing therapies.

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— David Vaillancourt

newly discovered imaging biomarker could be used to track changes in the brain associated with the progression of Parkinson’s disease, findings that represent a significant advancement that could aid in development of new drugs to slow progression of the neurodegenerative disease.

The team of University of Florida neuroscientists who made the discovery has validated the finding in data collected as part of an international multicenter study funded by the National Institutes of Health and published in the journal Brain. The study shows that on diffusion MRI scans there is an increase over one year in “free-water,” or fluid unconstrained by brain tissue, in a part of the brain called the substantia nigra in a large cohort of more than 100 newly diagnosed, unmedicated Parkinson’s disease patients. This change is not seen in people without Parkinson’s.

Additionally, in a subgroup of Parkinson’s disease patients who have been followed for up to four years across Europe and North America, analysis of the diffusion MRI data revealed that free-water in the posterior substantia nigra continued to increase.

Use of this noninvasive biomarker tool could lead to new ways of testing treatment of the progressively debilitating movement disorder, said senior author David Vaillancourt, a professor of applied physiology and kinesiology in UF’s College of Health and Human Performance and a member of the Evelyn F. and William L. McKnight Brain Institute.

“This could change the way studies are conducted for disease-modifying trials in Parkinson’s disease,” Vaillancourt said.

Until now, Parkinson’s disease has generally been diagnosed based on a patient’s symptoms.

“It’s been 200 years since the behavioral symptoms of Parkinson’s disease have been described, and we still use symptoms in testing therapies,” he said. “This is not the way it occurs in cancer; it’s not the way it occurs in heart disease or multiple sclerosis. But symptoms are still the hallmark of what’s used in Parkinson’s disease because there are few options out there.”

Now, this could change.

Two years ago, Vaillancourt’s team published findings based on a type of MRI technique known as diffusion MRI that revealed changes in free-water in the posterior substantia nigra that are specific to Parkinson’s patients. Now, the team’s new study validates findings in data collected across 10 sites, from the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Progression Marker Initiative database.

“To evaluate and validate an imaging marker, it is important to confirm results across data collection sites, and the Michael J. Fox Foundation database provides a unique opportunity to do that,” said lead author Roxana G. Burciu, a research assistant professor. The database provides a collection of clinical,

imaging and biological data available for researchers to use in order to advance knowledge on Parkinson’s disease.

A key finding of the new study is that results were consistent across sites. Another important finding is that the one- and two-year increase in free-water in the posterior substantia nigra predicts long-term progression of disease symptoms.

“We found that the increase in the free-water measurement in the substantia nigra goes up every year and keeps going up over four years,” Vaillancourt said.

“This means if you want to start designing studies to slow the progression of Parkinson’s disease, testing a drug on that measurement in the substantia nigra might be a good way to go. If the measurement in the substantia nigra is increasing year after year after year, and if you can stop that from occurring, you’re likely to slow or possibly stop the progression of the disease,” he said.

“This has never been shown before,” Vaillancourt added.

The study also found that the increase in the free-water measurement over one year’s time predicted a patient’s four-year clinical change in motor function.

“It suggests if you were able to control that measurement with medication as early as possible, then you could control long-term clinical progression,” Vaillancourt said.

David Vaillancourt, vcourt@ufl.edu

Michelle Jaffee

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Virtual

LEARNING Projects seeking to customize online experience

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he University of Florida is assembling researchers from multiple fields to seek solutions in two areas of 21st century education — personalizing online math instruction and adapting educational technology for students with visual impairments.

The studies are funded by two grants, worth more than $10 million combined, from the Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education.

Nearly $9 million of the grant money supports a new project called Precision Education: Virtual Learning Lab, which brings together top experts in informatics, math education and professional development for teachers.

Their charge is to advance a new approach for exploring massive sets of archived student data to update and personalize virtual instruction for future math students.

“With the increased use of computers in education, the large-scale mining of existing education data represents a big new opportunity for computers to help teachers adapt their practice for today’s digital world and help their students to improve their virtual learning,” said UF education technology Professor Carole R. Beal, the principal investigator of both studies.

The new Virtual Learning Lab team comprises faculty researchers at UF and the University of Notre Dame,

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and experts from Study Edge, a Gainesville-based online tutoring company.

Over the next five years, the researchers will conduct studies in the emerging discipline of precision education, which uses large-scale education data from prior students — such as standardized test scores, administrative records from schools and universities, and teaching methods used — to personalize the learning experience for future individual students.

No more one-size-fits-all lesson plans geared to some “statistically average” student profile.

The researchers will focus on online or virtual learners in math using the new technology of “big data” learning analysis. The precision education approach has researchers using powerful supercomputers to rapidly scrutinize the massive education data, plus figures from students’ use of interactive or group learning tools.

“Our grand challenge is to improve the achievement of struggling online students,” said Beal, who was recruited

to UF’s College of Education from the University of Arizona in 2014 to head the new UF Online Learning Institute.

“We will design new teacher development programs on the use of learning analytics and personalizing instruction, and how to track student progress when every student is doing something unique.”

Researchers at the Virtual Learning Lab will develop and test their prototype personalized model of precision education on a popular online tutoring tool called Algebra Nation, which the UF Lastinger Center for Learning launched in 2013 in tandem with Study Edge.

Algebra Nation has since been used by more than 3,000 teachers and 200,000 math students from all 67 Florida school districts — mostly ninth graders gearing up for the mandatory end-ofcourse exam in Algebra 1.

Near the end of the study, researchers will compare test results of students using the updated and personalized version of Algebra Nation with the scores of students using the regular version.

Beal said the Virtual Learning Lab also will serve as a national hub for researchers — forming a network for sharing findings and collaborating on new efforts to advance the fledgling field of precision education and personalized virtual learning.

The project’s co-principal investigator is Walter Leite, UF professor of research and evaluation methodology (REM) with expertise in big-data mining and learning analysis.

The theme of personalized online learning carries over to Beal’s second federal grant, a three-year, $1.4 million project to help solve the unique challenges that visually impaired students must overcome in learning online.

Think about it: How can students who can’t see the images on their computer screen solve algebra or geometry problems filled with line, bar and circle graphs, figures, geometric shapes and maps?

“In my investigations, I have found that students who appear disengaged in the traditional classroom are often among the most active

In my investigations, I have found that students who appear disengaged in the traditional classroom are often among the most active learners in the online learning setting.

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— Carole R. Beal

learners in the online learning setting,” Beal said.

For this study, Beal has assembled a research team with colleagues from Arizona and Florida to explore how technology can make online learning more accessible to students with special needs.

Nicholas Gage from UF’s special education program is co-principal investigator.

The researchers will develop and test an iPadbased instructional system to train students with visual impairments to locate and decipher targeted information in math graphics problems.

The system includes audio, print and braille cues in accompanying books to point users to targeted graphics and word problems.

They plan to recruit up to 150 middle and high school students with visual impairments for the project from regular schools and specialized residential programs in Florida, Arizona and other states.

Carole R. Beal, crbeal@coe.ufl.edu

Larry Lansford

Digitizing History

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Libraries using grant to continue scanning historic newspapers

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ampa wallowed beneath three feet of water. Jacksonville was buffeted by 60 mile-per-hour winds. Snapped power lines sparked fires in St. Augustine, and Orlando went dark as power plants failed, pummeled by a Category 3 hurricane.

Nearly 100 years after that storm, we can still trace its impact from the headlines of newspapers digitized by the University of Florida libraries.

UF’s George A. Smathers Libraries recently received $310,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to make pages from historic newspapers from Florida and Puerto Rico available digitally. The grant supplements earlier awards of $288,000 in 2015 and $325,000 in 2013 for a total award of $923,000, the single largest direct award ever received by the libraries.

The funds will be used to digitize more than 100,000 additional pages as part of the Florida and Puerto Rico Digital Newspaper Project, a collaboration between UF and the University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras. By the project’s conclusion, it aims to provide free online access to more than 300,000 pages dating from 1690 to 1963.

In addition to the 1921 storm — which struck before the advent of today’s storm-naming convention — the newspapers detail other natural disasters, such as the freezes that swept Florida in 1894 and 1895. They follow the rise and fall of railroads and steamboats, citrus and cattle, sugar cane and phosphate. They trace the impact of the Civil, Seminole and world wars. And now they will be available worldwide.

“Because these pages are not just on microfilm anymore, it completely changes the access. Anybody with an Internet connection can see them,” said project director Patrick Reakes, the libraries’ associate dean of scholarly resources and services. “It’s also a more sustainable way to preserve them. Microfilm gets old and brittle and hard to read. Once these pages are digitized, they’re safe. They’ll still be readable in the future.”

The digitized papers are available through the Library of Congress Chronicling America, the University of Florida Libraries Florida Digital Newspaper Library and the Biblioteca Digital Puertorriqueña at the University of Puerto Rico.

Patrick Reakes, pjr@uflib.ufl.edu

Alisson Clark

Explore 11

Rekindling Korean Connections Art and science converge in the Harn Museum’s Asian wing

By Cindy Spence

I JoHn Jernigan

n November 2007, two months before his first day on the job as Asian art curator at UF’s Harn Museum of Art, Jason Steuber went shopping in New York City with the museum’s development director.

Steuber wanted to show her a handful of galleries he believed to be good sources for building the collections. She wanted to learn more about his vision for the collections.

As they navigated the galleries on the Upper East Side, Steuber put a couple of pieces on hold. There is a ritual to buying art, Steuber says, the seller assessing the buyer’s knowledge, the buyer assessing the quality of the seller’s art. Steuber’s aesthetic must have clicked for one art dealer, almost too late. Steuber had one foot out the door when she said, “Hold on.”

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The art dealer went to a closet, brought out a box, and revealed a treasure, centuries old and temporarily homeless: a bodhisattva.

Steuber’s reaction was visceral and immediate. The bodhisattva was the missing centerpiece Steuber felt the Korean art collection needed. Before he knew how to pay for it, Steuber said, “We’ll take it.”

Homeless no longer, the bodhisattva became a Gator.

Bridging Cultures James A. Van Fleet arrived on the UF campus to lead the ROTC program and serve as football coach, and still ranks as the fourth most successful football coach in school history.

He had already distinguished himself in World War I and went on to serve in World War II, along with classmates

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Dwight D. Eisenhower and Omar N. Bradley, as part of the West Point class of 1915, labeled by military historians the “class the stars fell on.” Van Fleet served as commander of U.S. and U.N. forces in South Korea during the Korean War, and his son, a fighter pilot, was shot down over North Korea.

“He was a very good general, but he also loved the Korean people,” Steuber says, “and they loved him back.”

The football coach and military man had a gift for making friends. As he traveled in South Korea, he cultivated ties, and people often gave him gifts. He collected as well, and as the treasures piled up, he designated a room in his home the Korea Room. In 1988, the beloved general, then 96, donated 23 paintings and porcelain pieces in his Korea Room to UF. The gift came a couple of years before the Harn opened and a couple of decades before the Cofrin Asian Art wing was added. But Van Fleet’s Korea Room, in a sense, became the foundation for the Korean Gallery, the only gallery in the Harn dedicated to one country. The holdings are small — 194 today — but exceptional.

“We can go three rounds with anybody,” Steuber says.

Upon his arrival, Steuber found works that had been out of circulation in the art world for decades and set about the meticulous research of documenting their history and assessing their condition.

What he found was astounding: three national treasures, one scroll from each of the last three centuries, by noted Korean artists.

“These were important paintings,” Steuber says. “They had not been lost, but they had not been in the academic and art arenas. We brought them back into the dialogue, not only for American scholars, but for international scholars and Korea itself.”

Steuber set about identifying funding for conserving the scrolls. Each one can cost tens of thousands of dollars and take a year or more to restore and conserve.

The Van Fleet collection also included high-quality ceramics, and bringing the bodhisattva into the fold, Steuber 14 Fall 2017

knew, was a finishing touch that made the Korean collection special. But he also suspected the sculpture itself had not yet shared all its secrets. More research was needed.

Centuries-old Secrets

Gen. James A. Van Fleet appeared on two Time magazine covers and was much beloved by the Korean people.

Behind the paintings, sculptures and porcelain in a museum is an abundance of scholarship and science. As a 21st century curator, Steuber is eager to use technology, too; anything to learn more about the precious pieces entrusted to the Harn.

Not long after his arrival in 2008, he had an idea. Why not X-ray the bodhisattva?

He arranged an early morning radiology appointment and a ride to UF Health, and set off with the bodhisattva. They were met by a gurney and gently, the sculpture was wheeled into radiology about an hour before human patients were due.

“At first there were four of us, then another doctor, then another technician, and pretty soon we had a crowd from the radiology department,” Steuber says. “Then the head of radiology came down. I thought we were in trouble, but he said, ‘the CAT scan is open; let’s do a CAT scan.’”

Gung ho about the research possibilities, Steuber accompanied the bodhisattva to an imaging room. X-rays are not common in art, but not unheard of, either. A CAT scan, however, was a new opportunity and would reveal even more than an X-ray.

“That was a great moment, a very researchoriented moment,” Steuber says. “We brought the resources of a tier-one research university to bear, and we learned a lot.”

Although he was already convinced the bodhisattva was special, the CAT scan showed Steuber what a tour de force the sculpture really was.

Circa 1640, an artist, likely a monk, chose to approach the creation of this bodhisattva in a manner Korean art scholars had never seen. Sculptures of seated bodhisattvas are two pieces of wood.

This artist chose to use a massive tree and carve the bodhisattva from one trunk. Not only that, but the artist used a branch for the raised arm, instead of carving it separately and attaching it.

As the image took shape on a screen, Steuber’s excitement grew. For centuries, no one had guessed how the bodhisattva took shape. The skill it took to create this bodhisattva showed an exceptional talent and the sculptor’s respect for the sacred energy of the tree.

“The tree rings took shape, and we could see that the arm had been a branch,” Steuber says. “We learned a new piece of the bodhisattva’s story, 300 years later, and science and technology made that possible.”

Word of the unusual early morning patient filtered out in the medical community, and Steuber got a call two weeks later from a doctor at North Florida Regional Hospital. Would the bodhisattva like an endoscopy?

Steuber jumped at the chance to learn more of the bodhisattva’s secrets.

The bodhisattva’s topknot and hands come off, so the tiny endoscopic camera was inserted. The inside view was illuminating, Steuber says. Pages of religious text — sutras — previously retrieved decades earlier from the bodhisattva’s torso came with the sculpture. But the endoscopy showed that the head also contained sutras. Even more perplexing, one set of the bodhisattva’s sutras are printed in Ranjana, a Nepalese calligraphic script, and some of the other pages are printed in Chinese and are from the Lotus Sutra, one of the most sacred Buddhist texts.

The pages in the head will stay — it would be destructive to remove them — but the pages from the torso are being conserved and studied by scholars and monks that have kept the tradition and languages alive, in hopes of understanding more about the bodhisattva and Pages placed inside the bodhisattva centuries ago were revealed by a medical procedure called an endoscopy. The bodhisattva also underwent an X-ray and CAT scan, revealing secrets of how it was created, including the use of iron nails.

Explore 15

who placed the pages inside for safekeeping. The pages are now in Korea, being cleaned and stabilized by Seoulbased conservation scientists.

Conservation Collaboration Meanwhile, Steuber was following in Van Fleet’s footsteps to build a relationship with Korean art curators and scholars. Van Fleet was the driving force behind the Korea Society, formed after his retirement to continue to promote friendships between the U.S. and Korea, and Steuber busily collaborated with the Korea Foundation and the Korea Cultural Heritage Administration to identify the best conservators for the fragile scrolls and sutras and funding for the painstaking process.

It takes over a year to do the delicate work of conserving artworks on paper or silk. As the curator, Steuber decides whether to fill in loss or leave it as is, and it’s an important decision.

“Once we do this, it’s set for the next 100 to 150 years at least in terms of being stable,” Steuber says.

In concert with restoration is research.

“We respect the history, and try to find out how far back in history we can find the piece.”

Sutras, for example, could be marked with the names of donors who commissioned the pages. Conserving the pages could reveal a signature tying the pages to a specific monastery or monk.

Steuber’s conservation philosophy is to preserve a piece as is, rather than fill in places where pigment or paper has been lost.

Scrolls are particularly delicate because they are active paintings. They are meant to be rolled and unrolled, and over time, if they are not properly rolled, the scrolls can become wrinkled.

Foxing, or stains, can be repaired and dirt, like residue from smoky rooms, can be removed. The three scrolls likely traveled with Van Fleet in a military 16 Fall 2017

locker or chest, not always in climatecontrolled conditions.

Steuber says Korean professionals use natural materials in keeping with what the original artists would have had available, such as seaweed, and, importantly, all treatments are reversible.

“If it turns out in 100 years that I made a horrible decision, it can be reversed with organic materials,” Steuber says. “It’s not like we’re using Gorilla Glue.”

Once he found a Seoul-based conservation scientist, Steuber set about scheduling the scrolls for restoration and conservation. The first two paintings were conserved from September 2013 to November 2014: Kim Hongdo’s “Hunting with Falcons” from the 18th century and Jang Seung’eop’s “Scholar in a Garden” from the 19th century. Earlier this year, Kim Eunho’s “Folk Dancers Dressed as Buddhist Nuns” from 1922, was finished. Research has continued in tandem with conservation. Steuber says the most recent documentation of Kim Hongdo’s painting was in 1937, when it was part of a pair, and the whereabouts of its companion are unknown.

With the final painting restored, Steuber faces perhaps his most difficult decision: how to exhibit them. It’s much more complicated than simply hanging them.

Even in the protective environment of a museum, the fragile pieces are at risk from light and humidity. Just one flash photo is a day’s worth of sunlight exposure. Unlike other paintings, scrolls are not meant to be hung flat against a wall. The longer a scroll stays on display, the longer it will need to rest in the cool, dark confines of museum storage.

“If they go up for three months, they could stay down in storage for almost a decade,” Steuber says. “There is a fine line to walk, in how to share them, but also in how to protect them. We get one chance to show them, then they need to rest.”

These rare scrolls are two of the gifts from Gen. James A. Van Fleet. Kim Eunho’s “Folk Dancers Dressed as Buddhist Nuns,” above, is from 1922.

John Jernigan

Jason Steuber encountered this bodhisattva sculpture while visiting a New York gallery.

The bodhisattva was originally part of the John D. Rockefeller Jr. collection and was purchased for the Harn by museum benefactor Mickey Singer.

The pieces are important enough to show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art or at an international show in Korea, so Steuber wrestles with how to share them and protect them.

“In 200 years, someone will say ‘Thank goodness they didn’t harm them,’” Steuber says. “In 200 years, future Gators will be able to see them.”

For now, they rest, awaiting their debut.

Finding Meaning Below, “Scholar in a Garden” is

by Jang Seung’eop and dates to the late 1800s. The scrolls have been meticulously preserved by conservators in Seoul.

Each year, about 5,000 UF freshmen start their year at the Harn, standing before artworks like the bodhisattva as part of a required humanities course called “What is the Good Life?”

It is a question worthy of a bodhisattva, a Buddhist saint who stops short in the quest to achieve enlightenment to help others on their path to nirvana.

The bodhisattva speaks to onlookers with his hands, Steuber says. One hand is raised in the abhaya mudra: Do not fear me. The other is outstretched in the varada mudra: I will give you what you seek.

Three and a half centuries have left their mark on the bodhisattva. The gilt is worn bare in places, the painted blue eyes and red lips fading. But his aura is serene and inviting.

Steuber found the funding to fulfill his goal to acquire the bodhisattva from

UF and Harn benefactor Mickey Singer, who previously gave the Harn a Claude Monet oil painting. When approached about the bodhisattva, Singer was willing to explore more expensive pieces, but Steuber was steadfast that this bodhisattva, out of everything in the Asian art world at that moment, was the most exceptional and the right fit for expanding the Korean art collection.

Steuber invited Singer to the Harn when the bodhisattva arrived.

“I brought it in, and opened it, and his eyes teared up,” says Steuber, who explained the message in the mudras.

Singer says he was moved by the meaning. More importantly, he felt the bodhisattva belonged, that he had found the right home, a permanent home, at the University of Florida.

“I was there for the uncrating, and there was a tremendous transmission of power.

The piece was picked up and placed on a table, and we were on the floor, looking up,” Singer says, “just as we would be if he was teaching us.”

Timeless lessons of fearlessness and generosity.

Jason Steuber Cofrin Curator of Asian Art jsteuber@harn.ufl.edu Related website: http://exhibits.uflib.ufl.edu/ harnkoreanart/

Explore 17

John Jernigan

Professor Stephen Golant combines geography and gerontology to examine the decisions people make about where to age.

18   Fall 2017

Societal changes impact the geography of aging “All across the nation Such a strange vibration, People in motion, There’s a whole generation With a new explanation …”

San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair) Scott McKenzie, 1967

BY CINDY SPENCE

he flower children drawn to San Francisco in 1967 by the strains of Scott McKenzie’s song took to the streets of Haight-Ashbury with youthful abandon in a counter culture celebration, the Summer of Love.

A half century later, the turn on, tune in, drop out generation finds itself on a different march — into retirement — touching off a revolution in what it means to get old in America, says University of Florida Professor Stephen Golant.

Commemorating the 50-year anniversary of the Summer of Love for the journal Generations, Golant says if the hippies had had a crystal ball to show them how much their own old age would differ from their grandparents’ old age they might have been waving signs with different slogans, perhaps “love your elders” or “no more nursing homes.”

Just as the Baby Boom joins the Greatest Generation (ages 93-107) and Silent Generation (ages 72-92) in old age, society is becoming reluctant to describe anyone as old, as if “old” is a bad word, Golant says.

“The attitude toward aging has changed over the course of my career. We are much more sensitive about ageist practices and behaviors,” Golant says. “But there is a tremendous emphasis to want to deny aging as a stage of life.”

E xxplore 19

Since the late 1980s, the concept of successful aging has preached that you don’t have to get old if you exercise, eat right, get enough sleep, stay active, have a hobby. On the heels of that philosophy came the “aging in place” model, urging older Americans to stay in their homes as long as possible.

These messages, Golant suspected, were not one-size-fits-all prescriptions for older Americans. The generation that gave birth to celebrations of diversity following the social upheaval of the 1960s would not suddenly become a homogenous population living together in harmony in old age.

Instead, the baby boomers, Golant says, are “redefining the conception of getting old.”

And where the new generation of older Americans chooses to live, he thinks, could be a key to successful aging.

Aging in the Right Place For the next decade or more, 10,000 people a day in the United States will reach the age of 65, as the 63 million late middle age boomers — ages 50-64 — join the 16 million older boomers who make up a third of today’s population 65 and older.

With his interdisciplinary view as both gerontologist and geographer, Golant says one decision can affect the success of all the other decisions you make about aging: where you live.

For all their youthful rebellion, a huge portion of the love-in, sit-in set have ended up in the cul de sacs of suburbia, and their low-density living can be an impediment to accessing everything from groceries to doctors if they do not have auto transportation, Golant writes in his recent book, Aging in the Right Place.

A longtime family home can be a good choice — or not — but it is not the only option. Others span a continuum ranging from living in 20 Fall 2017

luxurious assisted-living communities that offer a suite of services from health care to housekeeping, to modest agerestricted communities or with family members. In between are various downsizing options offering varying levels of independence.

And another revolution in society — the technological revolution — may be the most critical factor in living independently in old age, Golant says.

In 2015, 58 percent of persons age 65 and older used the internet, compared with 14 percent in 2000. In the 1970s about 6 million older people lacked even a telephone. The change in connectedness in the last half century is allowing older

FOR THE NEXT DECADE OR MORE, 10,000 PEOPLE A DAY IN THE UNITED STATES WILL REACH THE AGE OF 65.

generations to shop, bank and manage their finances online. They are able to access information about medicine and health care and order medications online that are delivered to their door.

Self-driving cars could make the loss of a driver’s license a less traumatic event, as could services such as Uber. Barriers to navigating the physical environment in public have declined since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. Virtual personal assistants, such as Amazon’s Alexa, can be instructed by voice to do a range of tasks.

“Once upon a time, there was a concern that older people who had to get their checks cashed were susceptible

to being ripped off,” Golant says. “That threat is in many ways reduced.

“Gerontechnology — smart homes, telehealth and telemedicine — will allow baby boomers to track their physiological functions, health status, mobility, dwelling functions, and physical and social activities from the comfort of their homes,” Golant says. “Wireless sensors inserted in their bodies and clothing, and on the walls, floors, ceilings, furniture and appliances will transmit information to remote monitoring stations.

When sensors detect deviations from norms, they can trigger interventions by family or others.”

The up side is that older Americans may rarely need to leave their homes.

But that also is the down side, Golant says. Aging in place may be lonely, isolated from everyday human connections with grocery baggers or bank tellers or postal clerks.

Residential Normalcy The grandparents of the baby boomers were likely to live out life in a nursing home if their health failed, or at home with family. Golant says most people have an inflated idea of nursing home residency today. The nursing home population has fallen from 6 percent of older people in the 1970s to 2.5 percent today, a particularly startling statistic considering that the oldest populations today are in their 80s and 90s and that cohort is rapidly expanding.

Just as the hippies of the 1960s have exhibited an independent streak in their approach to aging, so have women. In 1970, only 42 percent of women 60-69 were licensed to drive. By 2014, 89 percent of women in that age group held a driver’s license and all the independence that goes with mobility. That will change the traditions of caregiving, Golant says.

“Daughters or daughters-in-law have been the default caregivers for our elders

Technology for the ages Online shopping and banking Virtual personal assistant Personal alarm

Smart thermostat

In-home medical monitoring

Personal health monitor

Home security and surveillance services Stair Lift

in the past,” Golant says, “but women have changed.

“We’re in a generation of women used to having jobs and having independence and sending their 18-monthold to child care,” Golant says. “If you’re willing to send your 18-monthold baby to child care, what is to say you wouldn’t be willing to have your mother or father in elder care? So, the idea of the daughter as the caregiver is changing, absolutely.”

If family care is not an option, older Americans who opt to age in place will

Self-driving cars

need to make peace with hired, in-home care, Golant says. While a 65-year-old in 2006 could expect another 12.2 years of active life, he had 6.3 years after that of dependent life.

In his book, Golant offers a theory of residential normalcy, the ideal situation in which older people feel comfortable, competent, and in control of their lives.

When residential normalcy is achieved, a person is aging in the right place.

Often, the quest to age in place, however, leads to a living situation in which a person is no longer comfortable

or competent. A longtime home may be too big, exhausting, or too expensive to maintain. Interestingly, Golant says, the same person so eager to follow a job opportunity or relocate for a lifestyle change at 30 often does not recognize the need to relocate due to the changing circumstances of aging, even when a move would make him more comfortable and self-reliant. Residential inertia sets in, and only about 2 percent of older homeowners and 12 percent of older renters move annually.

Many people also are reluctant to E xplore 21

part with their home, their most valuable investment.

“The house is viewed as a last resort source of money,” Golant says. “If you run out of money, you can sell the house and get your heart transplant and move in with your son and daughter-in-law.”

Alternatively, the home can be left as an inheritance.

Golant says it’s no surprise to find the older boomers are much more connected than their grandparents were, and the connections have boosted their wellbeing. They face the final stages of life better off in many ways than generations before. Golant hesitates even as he makes the statement. He worries that policy makers will target the very programs that have made a better life possible for aging Americans.

“Are older people better off? Absolutely. But it’s because of those programs like Social Security and Medicare.”

Even older Americans who appear to be relatively well off are often one or two calamities away from financial stress: a leaking roof, a heating system gone bad.

Golant says the middle class is most at risk. The rich can achieve their aging in place preferences or access top-notch facilities. The very poor will get at least some federal assistance to cover their care expenses. The middle class will not be able to afford the nicest retirement and care options and will be ineligible for government programs.

“A downside to underplaying old age, not celebrating old age, is that you don’t prepare for old age,” Golant says. “You don’t see it coming.

“We respect reaching adolescence or young adulthood or middle age,” Golant says. “I want to respect old age.”

Aging well is important, but so is accepting the eventual arrival of old age.

All generations, after all, get old.

Stephen Golant Professor of Geography golant@ufl.edu Related website: http://www.healthpropress.com/ product/aging-in-the-right-place/

22 Fall 2017

TIME PERIOD

Age in 2000

Age in 2017

Age in 2020

Age in 2040

Born <1928

73+

90+

93+

113+

3,710,837

1.2%

The Silent Generation

1928 to 1945

55 to 72

72 to 89

75 to 92

95 to 112

27,974,209

8.7%

The Baby Boomers

1946 to 1964

36 to 54

53 to 71

56 to 74

76 to 94

74,754,016

23.3%

Generation X

1965 to 1980

20 to 35

37 to 52

40 to 55

60 to 75

65,661,911

20.5%

The Millennial Generation

1981 to 1997

3 to 19

20 to 36

23 to 39

43 to 59

75,178,886

23.4%

Generation Z

1998 to Present

1 to 2

1 to 19

3 to 22

23 to 42

73,616,759

22.9%

320,896,618

100.0%

COHORT

The Greatest Generation

All Generations

U.S. 2015 Population

% U.S. Population 2015

90%

of seniors want to stay in their homes.

Finding your place ...

The right place is where an older person experiences residential normalcy, a state where residential comfort and residential mastery combine.

• Residential comfort: a person’s dwelling is appealing and full of pleasant memories, and in a friendly, engaging community.

• Residential mastery: a person feels competent, capable and in control of his surroundings.

• No residential normalcy: a person is out of both his comfort zone and mastery zone.

Example: a person who finds himself in a home he can no longer care for, surrounded by neighbors he no longer knows.

•

Out of sync living arrangements: a person can be in his comfort zone but out of his mastery zone, for example, living in a much-loved home in a desirable neighborhood, but unable to handle upkeep. Or, he can be out of his comfort zone, but in his mastery zone, for example, living in tiny quarters in an assisted living facility without many loved possessions, but confident of being cared for.

10%

Are you able to navigate your home?

of the $214 billion home improvement industry is dedicated to aging in place.

hom r u o y n y i a St

M

e v o

to

r

ir t e

e m e

Are you alone?

Are you in close proximity to family and friends?

Can you pay for in-home assistance: • Housekeeping • Cooking • Nursing

Can you remodel to: • Widen doors • Add grab bars • Lower counters • Add ramp

e …

co t n

ty… i n u mm

Are you willing to downsize – parting with a lifetime of possessions?

Can you afford an assisted living facility?

Do you make new friends easily?

E xplore 23

Students of History UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA STUDENTS DOCUMENT ONE OF THE NATION’S OLDEST COMMUNITIES AS THEY LEARN SKILLS THAT WILL HELP IT LIVE ON

BY CINDY SPENCE

24 Fall 2017

Photography by Cary Hazlegrove and the Preservation Institute Nantucket

t’s summer in Nantucket, and the hints of orange and blue mixed in among the tourists’ seersucker and straw hats are a sure sign that Gators are abroad on this history-soaked New England island.

The University of Florida students are here for an annual pilgrimage — Preservation Institute Nantucket — a field school more than a thousand miles north of UF’s Gainesville campus. The students will spend the summer developing new skills to document old spaces, all the while learning lessons in historic preservation.

Where better to learn than Nantucket, which boasts 800 pre-Civil War structures. The whole island is a National Historic Landmark District, and would appear to be frozen in time except for the crowds in prepster pastels and flip-flops, jamming the cobblestone lanes. Nantucket has been discovered, and as developers push to build, locals push to maintain the island’s character, making Nantucket a case study in historic preservation for eager UF students.

Director Morris “Marty” Hylton III, contributes to the orange-and-blue vibe, often donning a Gator baseball cap for field work. He says Preservation Institute Nantucket, or PIN, is ideal for teaching the nuances of historic preservation. It is not a fairy tale preservation story, with everyone pulling together in harmony, in homage to the past. It is a real-world community, where economic interests must be balanced against history, both for out-of-town developers and residents who find their land values skyrocketing and their shops and restaurants among the hottest tickets on the East Coast. In the real world, historic preservation does not take place in a vacuum, Hylton says, and that is keenly apparent in Nantucket.

Marty Hylton peers out of a window in Nantucket’s oldest house, the Jethro Coffin house, built in 1686.

E xplore 25

UF architecture Professor F. Blair Reeves (shown with wife Mary Nell) shared a vision of preservation for Nantucket with businessman Walter Beinecke Jr.

“When we talk about preservation, people think about preservation as freezing these things in time,” says Hylton, an associate scholar and director of UF’s Historic Preservation Program. “But you’re always making decisions that impact the built environment; it is a creative process.”

The island could be on the brink of being loved to death, much like the nation’s other beloved, but fragile, landscapes. National parks saw visitation break records in 2016 for the third straight year, and Nantucket’s tourism and development show no signs of slowing. Who, after all, volunteers to sit out the iconic hike or the ferry ride to paradise?

“It never used to be this busy; that’s new in the last five years,” says Jacsin Finger, a year-round resident and deputy director of the Maria Mitchell Association, named for the nation’s first professional female astronomer. “We’re losing the historic fabric right and left.

“There are houses that PIN has documented in the last few years, quite a few, that have been obliterated on the inside,” Finger says. “If it weren’t for PIN, we wouldn’t have that documentation.”

Nantucket owes both its historic preservation and its tony status as a tourist destination to Walter Beinecke Jr., a businessman who recognized Nantucket’s special allure. PIN likely would not exist but for Beinecke 26 Fall 2017

finding a like-minded preservation ethic in F. Blair Reeves, a UF architecture professor from 1949 to 1987.

The two men crossed paths by happenstance. A federal historic preservation program designed to tap into the expertise of college professors and professionals sent Reeves to Nantucket in 1969. Beinecke and Reeves shared a common, holistic vision for documenting and preserving the urban and cultural landscape of the island. For the next three years, Beinecke asked Reeves to return, accompanied by enterprising students, to help with the huge task of documenting Nantucket’s motherlode of historic buildings. Nantucket, realizing the resource at hand, put out a welcome mat.

“The town kept asking us to come back,” Hylton says. “Today, the Gator Nation is a part of Nantucket.”

Beinecke and Reeves made the informal arrangement official, forming PIN in 1972. UF was among the first four universities to offer preservation studies, and PIN is the nation’s oldest continuously operating field school for historic preservation, with nearly 700 alumni from UF and over 120 other institutions of higher learning.

To date, the island boasts hundreds of structures in the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), many of them documented by PIN students, making the students a key resource in historic preservation on the island.

PIN projects submitted to the Library of Congress have created an archive so large that there is more data on Nantucket than any other community in the nation.

Today, UF owns dorms for the students, three cottages for faculty and visiting lecturers, and the top floor of a Greek Revival building downtown called Sherburne Hall, which houses an open classroom, a library, a lab to study and analyze historic materials, such as mortar, and the latest technology.

Michael May, executive director of Nantucket Preservation Trust, says the students’ contribution to HABS — and Nantucket — is extraordinary.

“They’re only here during the summer months, but they make a huge impact,” May says.

Boom to Bust to Boom In 1659, English settlers arrived to find the Wampanoag Indians on the “far-away island,” their name for Nantucket, which is 14 miles long and three to five miles wide and shaped like a boomerang pitched 30 miles out into the Atlantic Ocean.

Trees were scarce, so wood was precious and had to be shipped from the mainland, along with other building materials. Nantucketers became masters at reusing materials, wasting no board or brick or pane of glass in restoring or expanding a home. The ethic continues today — failure to recycle would make a Nantucketer a pariah — with the town dump in Madaket as much a recycling center as a waste disposal site. Islanders know if they are looking for something to check the dump, aka the Madaket Mall, first. Finger, a summer resident turned full-time resident 20 years ago, says her father once found a lovely oriental rug.

Local lore says a Nantucketer in 1690 looked offshore at the sea teeming with right whales and predicted Nantucket’s whaling future. The islanders harvested the sea, the global export of whale oil making them wealthy by colonial standards, although Nantucket’s Quaker roots kept ostentation to a minimum.

The modest gray shingles of many Nantucket homes — and the island’s fog — gave rise to the nickname, Little Gray Lady of the Sea. As the right whale fishery collapsed, the “Nantucket Navy” ventured from the Atlantic to the Pacific, catching the more oil-rich sperm whales. Their voyages sometimes took three years, and

Michael May, executive director of Nantucket Preservation Trust, says the contributions of PIN students have an extraordinary impact on documenting the island’s history.

the growth of their families and gaps between births mirrored the timing of the whaling expeditions. The romance of Nantucket’s whalers caught the American imagination as well. Herman Melville based Moby-Dick on the disastrous real-life voyage of the whale ship Essex and its Nantucket crew.

Today’s Nantucket wears its history: cottages closely situated, so that families could lean on each other when their sons and husbands were away, and grand Greek Revival mansions that reflect the wealth that came from the whales. On Main Street, a visitor can stroll past the Three Bricks, three identical homes a whale oil merchant built for his three sons, so that they would not have to endure the hardships of whaling.

By 1850, whaling was the fifth largest industry in the U.S. By 1900, it was gone. When whaling collapsed, Nantucket’s isolation from the mainland kept it preserved from real estate activity. A surge in tourism at the turn of the century was offset by the Great Depression. By the time tourism ticked up again in the 1950s in the era of postwar sprawl, Beinecke had arrived on the scene, then Reeves, with his seasonal crew of eager UF students. With singular purpose, the two men believed historic preservation would be the key to

Nantucket’s survival.

Their efforts were bolstered by federal historic preservation statutes enacted in the 1960s and by Nantucket’s own forward-looking preservation laws.

Nantucket is the site of the nation’s first land bank, which started in 1983 and owns 2,000 of the island’s undeveloped 10,000 acres. About 50 percent of the island’s natural space is preserved.

That instinct to preserve natural spaces plays a role in the intense pressure today on Nantucket’s built environment.

The scarcity of land has caused would-be residents to look to historic structures for their summer homes.

Preservation Inside and Out In 2000, Nantucket was placed on the list of the 11 Most Endangered Historic Places by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The influx of wealthy new residents looking for a summer hotspot had increased development pressure to the point that the island was losing chunks of its historic fabric, and it was happening, at first, without much notice.

From the outside, the cottages and homes look like a whaling family might walk out the door at any minute. Inside some, however, 21st century luxury has

The Hadwen House, top, was built in the Greek Revival style in 1845 by a whaling merchant.

Just across Main Street, identical homes, middle, known as the Three Bricks were built

by Joseph Starbuck for his three sons. Bottom, students learn about the composition of building materials, such as mortar, so that homes can be restored authentically.

E xplore 27

Students examine substances, such as mortar, in order to recreate building materials consistent with the age of the buildings.

Hylton and doctoral candidate Sujin Kim use a laser scanner to document historic structures. The laser delivers a highly accurate point cloud that can be used to produce ethereal images, such as this view of Orange Street.

replaced the historic interiors. Ask a local if Nantucket’s claim to have 800 preserved pre-Civil War structures is still true, and they shrug. No one really knows. The Historic District Commission estimates 15 to 20 historic interiors may be destroyed each year.

Historic preservation rules strictly govern the outside of buildings. Behind closed doors, however, an owner can do whatever he chooses. Locals call it a gut rehab, and a Dumpster outside an 18th century cottage is a sure sign of heritage at risk, May says.

Hylton is passionate but reasonable.

Modern Americans do not want to live in a museum or read by whale-oil lanterns. But he says much of the interiors can be preserved while providing for modern conveniences, such as master baths and dishwashers. The home at 1 York Street, one of the students’ documentation challenges of summer 2016, is a prime example.

28 Fall 2017

Owner Pen Austin gave the students free run, and during the summer they came and went, along with workers and Austin herself. An architectural conservationist, Austin has worked on many historic renovations on the island, and each summer looks forward to the collaborations with the students. Her 1834 house was completely intact — “apart from windows switched out in 1920, such a shame” — and she began her renovation with reverence for the past.

“The philosophy is that you use the same dimensions, same wood, same materials for repairs that the house was built with. That way you’ve got compatible behavioral characteristics of the repair material with the original fabric, so things are going to move in the same way, behave in the same way,” says Austin, taking a break from repairing traditional, lime plaster walls. When she finishes the renovation, she will enter into a preservation easement with the

Nantucket Preservation Trust, so even when she sells and moves on to the next project, the building will stay preserved.

“A lot of incredible interiors are just ending up in the Dumpsters,” Austin says. “It is heartbreaking.”

That makes PIN’s contribution all the more important, May says.

“What they’re doing now with the 3-D laser scanning has taken us to a different level, bringing 21st century technology to the island, and I think that’s really critical,” May says. “The island has always been in the forefront of preservation, so it makes sense that it’s happening, but it’s exciting to see that trend continuing. We needed a little boost, and I think the 3-D laser scanning is doing that. What they’re doing really is innovative.”

The laser scanning creates a 3-D virtual model that takes shape as a cloud of millions or hundreds of millions of tiny points. The digital models are used

Cindy Spence

The question arises: at what point does interior gutting damage a home’s preservation status?

Architectural conservationist Pen Austin strives to restore homes with materials that the original builders would have used, so the old and the new “behave in the same way.”

to document, preserve and interpret historic buildings and natural landmarks. PIN has an archive of decades of pen and ink elevations of the island’s heritage and is steadily adding the laser scans.

Sujin Kim, a doctoral candidate who taught classes in 2016 and 2017, but whose first trip to Nantucket was as a student in 2015, says PIN’s approach to using technology for heritage conservation gives the students — future preservation professionals — hands-on experience.

Last summer, students got a glimpse of the power of technology. They measured interior elevations for their headquarters at Sherburne Hall by hand, in teams, and produced drawings. It took the four teams all day to render the classroom. Then Kim had the students use the laser scanner. It took roughly three scans — about 30 minutes — to produce a 3D image, and allowed the

students access to the upper reaches of the ceiling that they had not been able to measure by hand.

“Traditionally, in preservation, there has been a belief that you have to touch and smell things. Technology will not replace that, but it will assist,” Kim says.

“We tell the students, they don’t have to remember every step of the software or technology, that could be obsolete next year. The important thing is to see the possibilities in the technology.”

PIN is also on the forefront of a trend to try to preserve interiors, avoiding the gut rehabs, Hylton and May say. Interiors are uncharted territory in a way.

While many property owners embrace, and others grudgingly yield to, historic preservation of exteriors, walk through the front door, and it’s a different story.

“This is a tough issue, and it’s cutting edge in historic preservation,” May says.

“People don’t have to open their doors.”

The question arises: at what point does interior gutting damage a home’s preservation status?

“What’s so unique about Nantucket is these interiors have remained for 200, 250 years,” May says. “People used to come to Nantucket and want to live differently than what we call America.

Who cares if you have one bathroom, or don’t have a dishwasher? Now people are buying historic buildings and completely gutting the interior. That didn’t happen 20 years ago. One of the reasons you came here was the history.

“Now, it’s just the place to be.”

PIN students’ ambitious goal is to document the mostly residential interiors, using public records, among other archives. When they can gain access,

as in Austin’s house, they gather more detailed data and do laser scanning, blending traditional preservation with modern preservation.

“We don’t have any real models to work off of, so we’re creating a model,” May says. “It’s a good partnership with the University of Florida.”

Beinecke’s daughter, Barbara Spitler, who still summers on Nantucket, remembers her father’s vision. He said Nantucket was different from Colonial Williamsburg, which operates as a living history museum, because it is a thriving town. And he wanted to save it from the kitschy tourism of Cape Cod. “He cared about Nantucket,” Spitler says. “And he thought PIN was vital to keeping Nantucket preserved. Under Marty’s leadership, PIN has become a leader in historic preservation on the island.”

After seeing the potential in laser scanning, Spitler and others encouraged Hylton to ask the town for help to do more scanning, the first time PIN ever asked for aid. A couple of town leaders protested, asking why Nantucket would give money to a university in Florida.

Finger recalls someone piped up: “You do realize they’ve been here for more than 40 years? They’re part of this community.” They got the funding.

As summer residents go, the PIN students are not the high rollers, yet their work may be a big part of the island’s future. One of the lessons they are learning is oddly contradictory: that even the best-preserved communities can be at risk.

“You can’t rewrite history,” Hylton says, “and you can’t undo changes.”

Morris Hylton III Director of the Historic Preservation Program mhylton@dcp.ufl.edu

Related website: https://dcp.ufl.edu/historic-preservation/preservationinstitute-nantucket/

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30 Fall 2017

Bernard Brzezinski

Hurricane Irma provided both opportunities and challenges for UF research

By Cindy Spence

As the University of Florida shuttered offices in advance of Hurricane Irma, wind engineer and hurricane researcher Forrest Masters and his team readied a convoy of equipment, fueled up and headed into the storm.

E xploreâ&#x20AC;&#x192;â&#x20AC;&#x201A;31

32 Fall 2017

Bernard Brzezinski

“We wanted to get into position, so that the eyewall would pass directly over our weather stations,” says Jon Sinnreich, research coordinator for the Powell Family Structures & Materials Laboratory, a 9,000-square-foot facility that houses a wind tunnel. “That way we could measure peak winds.”

Viewers glued to The Weather Channel for coverage of Hurricane Irma saw a live shot of the team as it set up one of four weather stations in Southwest Florida. Two 49-foot towers with instruments every eight feet were set up in Naples. Two 33-foot towers went to Bonita Springs and Punta Gorda. Once set up, the team evacuated.

“We’re not storm chasers,” Sinnreich says. “We deploy the weather stations, then clear out of the path of the storm.”

In the case of Irma, that meant returning to Gainesville to secure their own homes. But during Hurricane Harvey, they set up as close to the path as possible in Rockport and Port Lavaca, Texas, then holed up in a nearby airport.

The shorter towers are designed to withstand wind speeds of more than 200 miles per hour. While they might measure stronger winds closer to shore, Sinnreich says a big consideration in location is being able to retrieve the towers after the storm. If a beach erodes, expensive equipment and data could wash away.

Masters, a civil engineering professor and associate dean for research and facilities in the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering, had his eye on Irma as it formed off Cape Verde.

“Storms like Irma present a rare opportunity to deploy precision instruments that measure the variation in wind velocity through the entire hurricane episode,” Masters says. “These data are essential for grounding theory that underpins wind tunnel modeling and siting of wind energy resources, among other efforts to make our communities more resilient to extreme wind events.”

UF wind engineer and hurricane researcher Forrest Masters was interviewed on The Weather Channel after setting up research equipment in Irma’s path in South Florida.

Data from Harvey and Irma are being analyzed and added to a database that includes 30 named storms. Using the database, researchers can improve the understanding of wind field behavior around buildings and infrastructure.

Irma’s size, 400 miles across, made it a statewide threat. UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences conducts research throughout the state and operates Cooperative Extension Offices in all 67 counties. Those employees sprang into action to protect research and aid their communities.

At the Tropical Research and Education Center in Homestead, mechanic Jorge Vergels protected years’ worth of experiments when the power went out.

Vergels pushed through 70- to 80-mph winds when the generator failed, got instructions by telephone for fixing it, and managed to get it running.

His quick response preserved research samples collected over many years and saved hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Researcher Wagner Vendrame echoed the sentiments of his colleagues at the research center when he noted that his lab alone contains refrigerators full of reagents and chemicals, incubators and a bioreactor, and a -70 degrees Celsius

freezer that stores DNA and RNA samples that would have been rendered useless if thawed.

“In some instances, loss of research material would have been irreversible and seriously compromise an entire research project,” Vendrame says.

Groves, fields and greenhouses were less fortunate. UF/IFAS Dean of Extension Nick Place says citrus production losses amount to 50 to 90 percent, with similar losses in vegetables and ornamental crops in some locations. Communities that rely on fishing and shellfish have lost boats, and in the Florida Keys, about 450,000 lobster traps were damaged or lost. Those same crops are also the subjects of UF/IFAS research, and damages could be in the millions when a final tally is reached.

Extension agents pitched in after the storm, with Putnam/Flagler County Extension Director Sharon Treen keeping emergency responders fed, and Okeechobee County dairy agent Colleen Larson cooking and delivering food to dairy workers, so they could tend to thousands of cows.

UF students formed a blueberry brigade with the help of horticulture sciences department Chair Kevin Folta,

Brandon Czarzasty begins deploying the first instrumentation tower during Hurricane Irma.

who led them into fields in Pasco County to restake 100,000 blueberry bushes flattened by the storm to keep them from dying. And in advance of the storm, students who had been collecting data on citrus greening rushed out to finish experiments on citrus trees, anticipating the post-storm damage to the research stock from flooding and fruit drop.

Place says Irma shows the value of science-based information in a crisis.

“For many of us, life has returned to normal,” Place says. “But we must not forget the long recovery ahead for our agriculture and natural resource families.”

Not all evacuees were human.

Throughout the state, the UF Veterinary Emergency Treatment Service went to work, providing crates for pet-friendly shelters and assessing animals, like horses and livestock, that had to shelter in place. The team also deployed to the Florida Keys to provide emergency veterinary care for animals that were not evacuated.

The Keys’ direct hit also affected a research project to restore populations of the critically endangered Miami Blue butterfly. Florida Museum of Natural

Bernard Brzezinski

“Storms like Irma present a rare opportunity to deploy precision instruments that measure the variation in wind velocity through the entire hurricane episode.”

— Forrest Masters

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Geena Hill Geena Hill

IFAS

“The most meaningful indicator that we’re a great university is how our employees improve the quality of life of the communities we serve every day. That’s especially true on the worst days.”

— Jack Payne

34 Fall 2017

History Assistant Curator of Lepidoptera Jaret Daniels, who has studied the Miami Blue for more than a decade, has a captive research population at the museum, but the wild population is only found on a handful of uninhabited islands and in the Great White Heron National Wildlife Refuge, which were in the path of the storm. Daniels says it will take several weeks to determine how many survived, if any.

“These butterflies certainly evolved to weather repeated storms, and in the past would have recolonized from adjacent areas. Now, all the eggs are in one basket. With habitat loss, the two remaining wild populations don’t have another wild population to help with recovery,” Daniels says. “They either survived or they didn’t.”

The good news is that the museum’s captive population can be used to help in recovery, Daniels says.

Daniels says he is cautiously optimistic about the fate of the Schaus’ Swallowtail farther up the Keys in North Key Largo and Biscayne National Park, although the Schaus’ Swallowtail and the Miami Blue have lost enough habitat that a hurricane could be a tipping point, Daniels says.

In the museum’s Butterfly Rainforest, a 6,400-square-foot screened exhibit, the 1,000 or so captive butterflies and moths were evacuated prior to the storm by employees with butterfly nets, who placed them in flight cages inside laboratories for the duration of Irma. Some of the species on exhibit are non-native, so the museum must guard against their accidental release.

The museum also had sandbags around the Montbrook fossil dig south of Gainesville to preserve the excavation site, which is the first evidence in North Florida of fossils from the late

Hemphillian land mammal age, about 5 million years ago. When they inspected after the storm, they found the site intact except for some minor erosion that yielded a bonus: plenty of bones of elephants, turtles and other extinct creatures sticking out of the side of the pit.

All the better, says museum paleontologist Jonathan Bloch, since the museum is ready to start recruiting volunteers for the fall 2017 dig season.

Jack Payne, senior vice president for agriculture and natural resources, notes that UF was named a top 10 public university during the storm.

“The most meaningful indicator that we’re a great university is how our employees improve the quality of life of the communities we serve every day,” Payne says. “That’s especially true on the worst days.”

Jeff Gage

Workers at the Florida Museum of Natural History, above left, evacuated UF’s Butterfly Rainforest ahead of the storm, sheltering the butterflies in flight cages in laboratories. UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences saw storm impacts across a variety of crops and at research centers and extension offices across the state, middle photo. Bottom left, wild populations of the endangered Miami Blue butterfly were nowhere to be found following the storm, but captive breeding populations at UF laboratories provide an opportunity to restore some of the butterflies to their Florida Keys habitat. Below, paleontologist Jonathan Bloch, foreground, inspects the Montbrook dig site following Irma. He found no damage, but thanks to erosion, a number of fossils were protruding from the walls.

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Research Assistance

Innovative program helps physicians become researchers

By Meghan Meyer

T

he woman in the UF Health Jacksonville emergency room presented a puzzle for attending physician Faheem Guirgis. In her early pregnancy, she had a sore throat and a fever. Those symptoms were not alarming compared with those of other patients being seen on that busy day, but Guirgis had a feeling that something wasn’t quite right with her.

He ran routine lab tests, which came back “a little off,” he says. Guirgis handed her care over to the next shift, but overnight the woman’s condition deteriorated, and she went into shock. The expectant mother, it turned out, was septic. The nation’s third-leading killer, sepsis is a complication in which the body has a severe, overwhelming response to an infection.

Guirgis says that if he had access to a test for a sepsis biomarker, he could have diagnosed the sepsis before her symptoms emerged.

“If I had known she was septic when I saw her in the beginning, I would have done things a bit differently up front,” says Guirgis, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at the UF College of Medicine — Jacksonville.

“I would have been able to discern more clearly.”

Ultimately, the woman recovered and was discharged from the hospital with an ultrasound of her healthy baby.

But the July 2015 case demonstrated to Guirgis the need to better connect research into areas such as sepsis with his clinical work.

Thanks to an innovative program at the University of Florida, Guirgis and other early-career researchers now are marrying those aims in ways that not only help them develop their careers but could also become a model for fostering research at hospitals across the country that have large, underserved patient populations.

Guirgis, 36, is among those physicians who combine their passion for working with patients with a deep interest in looking into the “why” of diseases. “I come from the clinical world with scientific questions,” he says. “How can I improve the quality of care for my patients?”

Scientific research helps clinicians better treat patients, and clinicians have practical experience treating patients that researchers in the lab do not. The UF Clinical and Translational Science Institute, or CTSI, seeks to bridge these two

Explore 37

worlds. Through a variety of programs and services, the CTSI speeds the transition of scientific discoveries ‘’from bench to bedside.’’

The CTSI is one of more than 60 research institutions nationwide that receive funding through the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, or NCATS. The center offers programs, including the Clinical Translational Science Award, or CTSA, which help clinicians develop research careers.

But clinicians at satellite campuses, even if they are at large urban hospitals such as UF Health Jacksonville that are affiliated with a nationally ranked academic institution, can face barriers to doing research.

Public hospitals in big cities see lots of patients: UF Health Jacksonville handles more than 90,000 emergency department visits and more than 5,000 traumas each year. This provides opportunities for research, but these hospitals often lack the research resources and support to make them competitive for NIH grants to support that research.

Physicians such as Guirgis often face a choice: Leave their public hospitals and the patient populations they are devoted to serving and move to an institution with a more robust research infrastructure, or stay and try to find some way to advance their research goals.

Overcoming Obstacles “I’ve always been fascinated by the biology of disease,” Guirgis says. “When I took this job, I had no idea I wanted to do research. As I started to take care of sepsis patients, I started to have a lot of questions.”

Guirgis’ interest in research led him to Thomas A. Pearson, UF Health executive vice president for research and

38 Fall 2017

education. Pearson recognized the intellectual hunger in Guirgis.

“I’ve been at a variety of academic health centers and rural teaching hospitals, and there are others like Faheem throughout those institutions,” says Pearson. “It’s part of our job to identify them and say, ‘Is research something you want to do in your career?’ The CTSA is the ideal vehicle for that because you want to link basic science with clinicians, and that’s Dr. Guirgis’ story.”

“I’m just kind of an inquisitive person,’’ Guirgis says. “I didn’t realize it but I probably wanted to be a researcher all along.’’

Pearson urged Guirgis to apply to the “K College,” which Pearson launched several years ago as an informal lunchtime discussion among earlycareer researchers and clinicians who were interested in doing translational research. Part of the CTSI Translational Workforce Development Program, the K College prepares participants to apply for the CTSI’s KL2 Scholar Multidisciplinary Program, which provides two years of financial support and helps faculty develop collaborative careers in clinical and translational research. The K College now has 182 participants.

Guirgis also began working with his main mentor, Dr. Frederick Moore, a professor of surgery at the UF College of Medicine and the principal investigator of the UF Sepsis and Critical Illness Research Center. The first of its kind in the nation, the center was created with a $12 million, five-year grant from the NIH National Institute of General Medical Sciences in 2014.

The center serves as a tool to promote collaboration and enables young faculty to garner additional NIH funding, Moore says.

“It plays the unique role of developing young investigators who absorb the cultural and scientific philosophies of team science that cannot be gained by

The UF Clinical and Translational Science Institute, or CTSI, seeks to bridge two worlds.

Through a variety of programs and services, the CTSI speeds the transition of scientific discoveries ‘’from bench to bedside.’’

working in a typical return-on-investment, RO1-funded, investigator lab,” he says. “Not only are they mentored by older, more established physicianscientists, but they frequently have close interactions with basic health scientists, biomedical engineers, biostatisticians, computational biologists and medical ethicists.”

Guirgis’ co-primary mentor is Christiaan Leeuwenburgh, director of the UF Division of Biology of Aging, who also serves on the directorate of the CTSI Translational Workforce Development Program.

Other mentors included Lyle Moldawer, a professor and vice chair of research in the UF College of Medicine’s Department of Surgery; Dr. Sunita

Mindy Miller

University of Florida Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine Faheem Guirgis and Scientific Research Manager Ricardo Ungaro work with samples in the UF Sepsis and Critical Illness Research Center.

Dodan and the late Dr. Robert Wears; Srinivasa Reddy of UCLA; and Dr. Alan Jones of the University of Mississippi Medical Center.

Guirgis honed his research skills at the sepsis center and was accepted into the KL2 Scholar Multidisciplinary Program, becoming the first Jacksonville-based physician to participate in the program.

In September, Guirgis landed a fouryear NIH National Institute of General Medical Sciences grant to pursue sepsis research. The grant will allow him to develop a satellite lab at the UF College of Medicine at UF Health Jacksonville, where his research team can explore how sepsis affects patients in the Jacksonville region.

“Dr. Guirgis is a great example of how interested clinicians at satellite campuses can benefit from the support, mentoring, resources and career development of a CTSA hub,” Pearson says.

“Not only that, his experience shows how we can foster research at clinical sites with large and underserved patient populations like Jacksonville.”

The cycle of research and discovery is continuing: Guirgis’ new grant freed up his spot in the KL2 program, providing grant funds for another earlycareer scientist to enter the program.

Guirgis’ journey demonstrates a new model for developing paths to research careers, says CTSI Director David R. Nelson. “Instead of a single investigator finding a mentor and developing

a K award, we have these multidisciplinary teams linking around a disease area,” Nelson says. “It fosters a great opportunity to bring in young faculty for productive pathways in training development.”

It’s the kind of team science and research ecosystem the CTSI aims to build, he says.

And it strengthens the ties between the UF Health teams in Gainesville and Jacksonville.

“I see clinical research as part of quality health care, and I believe that patients need access to both,” Guirgis says. “UF Health Jacksonville needs access to the UF CTSI in Gainesville, which has access to the resources needed for an NIH career.”

Explore 39

Mindy Miller

Dr. Thomas Pearson, right, encouraged Dr. Faheem Guirgis to explore research opportunities.

Underserved Populations When clinicians working at hospitals such as UF Health Jacksonville conduct research, it’s easier for more patients who are members of minority groups to participate because the research is being done where they already go for health care.

40 Fall 2017

Access to research is doubly important for underserved populations such as those in and around Jacksonville, which is poised to become a majority minority city: 55 percent of its youngest residents are members of a minority group.

Minorities also tend to be underrepresented in health research. Although 40 percent of Americans belong to a racial or ethnic minority, individual research studies often don’t recruit groups of participants that reflect the diversity of the groups of patients who ultimately will take the medication or use the therapies that result from that research. The same medication might work differently in people with

different genetic makeups, compounding the problem when research studies tend to recruit more white participants.

When clinicians working at hospitals such as UF Health Jacksonville conduct research, it’s easier for more patients who are members of minority groups to participate because the research is being done where they already go for health care.

CTSI programs also seek to promote diversity among the researchers themselves, overcoming another barrier to research-participant recruitment.

The statewide OneFlorida Pragmatic Clinical Trials and Implementation Science Minority Education Program, or MEP, partners with historically black

Sepsis Symptoms confusion or disorientation

chills or fever

clammy or sweaty skin

colleges and universities. Junior faculty members receive hands-on research experience by partnering with faculty members affiliated with the OneFlorida Clinical Research Consortium, led by the UF CTSI in collaboration with its CTSA partner Florida State University and the University of Miami Clinical and Translational Science Institute.

This program is made possible by the James and Esther King Biomedical Research Program.

Funding also helps clinicians such as Guirgis overcome a chief obstacle to conducting research: The demands on their time. Participants essentially buy back the time they would normally devote to clinical practice and put that time toward research.

shortness of breath

high heart rate

extreme pain or discomfort

“That meant research could be more than a hobby,” Guirgis says. “Once you have protected time for research, it overcomes a barrier.”

Even the initial step of devoting personal time to research is not something many clinicians can do.

“Faheem is execeptional in that he gave of his own time to work his way out of the clinic,” Leeuwenburgh says.

“It doesn’t happen too often. It’s a wonderful story.”

Guirgis has helped propel initiatives in Jacksonville, Leeuwenburgh says. And his research is already showing results. Guirgis says his team has demonstrated for the first time that sepsis patients often have high levels of “dysfunctional HDL,” or high-density

lipoproteins, in their blood.

They want to find out whether dysfunctional HDL, a kind of cholesterol, can predict chronic critical illness, an intensive care unit stay of greater than 14 days with organ dysfunction, or long-term adverse outcomes after sepsis.

Chronic critical illness has become a common problem in sepsis patients, and results in decreased quality of life and eventual death. Research into chronic critical illness is being spearheaded

by Moore and Moldawer at the Sepsis Center.

Guirgis’ study has enrolled patients in Jacksonville and Gainesville. His team will compare a cohort of emergency department patients (who have “community-acquired” sepsis) with a cohort of patients who developed sepsis after having surgery (“hospitalacquired” sepsis), looking at the differences between these two kinds of sepsis and the role of dysfunctional HDL. His ultimate goal is to develop lipid-based therapies for sepsis.

Guirgis says his interest in research has not taken away from his work with patients. Doing this research “has absolutely informed my clinical practice,” he says.

An example: The national definitions for sepsis recently changed to include a Sequential Organ Failure Assessment, or SOFA, score to predict outcomes in sepsis patients. Guirgis had already been using the SOFA score as part of his research for over three years.

Guirgis sees that his research is inextricably woven into his passion for clinical care.

“I like taking care of really sick people and turning them around,’’ he says. “Why do some people get better, and some don’t? It’s the central question of personalized medicine.”

Faheem W. Guirgis Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine fguirgis@ufl.edu

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John Jernigan

Christopher Martyniuk

GUT CHECK

BY JASENKA ZUBCEVIC & CHRISTOPHER MARTYNIUK

A

universe of organisms living inside you may affect every part of your body, from your brain to your bones, and even your thoughts, feelings and your attempts to lose weight.

This is a universe of trillions of microorganisms — or what we biologists call microbiota — that live in your gut, the part of your body responsible for digestion of the food you eat and the liquids you drink.

As researchers, we have been looking increasingly into the effect these bacteria have on their host’s body, from obesity to mental illness and heart disease. With obesity, for example, these tiny organisms may play a big role by influencing what foods we crave and how our bodies hold onto fat.

In a recent study of the gut microbiome, we set out to determine whether the microbiota in the gut can be affected not only by our nervous system but also by an unsuspected source — our bone marrow.

Our hope is that, by understanding the interactions of the microbiome with other parts of the body, one day treatments could be developed for a range of illnesses.

Not So Simple After All The gut, which includes your esophagus, stomach, small and large intestines, colon and other parts of your digestive system, is the first line of defense and the largest interface between the host — in this case, a person — and the outside world.

After birth, the gut is the first point of entry for environmental and dietary influences on human life. Thus, the microbiota in the gut play a crucial role during human growth, as they contribute to development and maintenance of our immune system throughout our lifetime.

While we initially thought of the microbiota as relatively simple organisms, the fact is that they may not be so simple after all. Gut microbiota can be as personal and complex as a fingerprint.

42 Fall 2017

There are more bacteria in your gut alone than cells in your entire body.

This vast bacterial universe contains species that combined can have up to 150 times more genes than exist in humans. Research suggests that the bacteria in our gut predates the appearance of humans and that they may have played an important role in evolutionary separation between our ape ancestors and us.

Healthy bacteria actively interact with the host immune system in the gut. They contribute to the barrier between disease-causing microorganisms or infections introduced via ingestion.

They also help prepare the host immune system to defend the body. The wrong mix of microbes, on the other hand, can contribute to many digestive, immune and mental-health disorders and even obesity.

These tiny organisms work very hard in digestion. They help digest our food and can release nutrients and vitamins essential for our well-being, all in exchange for the privilege of existing in a nutritious environment.

Researchers are actively exploring the many facets of this symbiotic relationship. Recent data show a link between the diversity and richness of gut microbiota and the way we store fat, how we regulate digestion hormones and blood glucose levels, and even what types of food we prefer.

This may also be a reason our eating habits are so difficult to change. Some research suggests that microbiota may generate cravings for foods they specialize in — even chocolate — or those that will allow them to better compete for resources against other bacteria.

A Three-Way Call?

There’s growing evidence of a link between the brain and our microbiota as well. The brain is the equivalent of a computer’s main processor, regulating

all physiological variables, including the immune system, the body’s defense against infection and illness.

All immune cells are “born” in the bone marrow. From our previous research, we knew that increased bone marrow inflammation, one of many consequences of high blood pressure, was driven by a direct message from the brain.

The gut, too, plays an important role in preparing the immune system for battle.

So we wondered: Could the bone marrow immune cells be playing a role in signaling between the brain and the gut? We wanted to find out.

Using a novel experimental mouse model, we replaced the bone marrow that occurs naturally within a mouse with bone marrow cells from a different, genetically modified mouse. This replacement marrow was deficient in a specific molecule called adrenergic receptor beta, which made the bone marrow less responsive to the neural messages from the brain.

By studying this new mouse model, we determined that our nervous system — directed by our brain — can modify the composition of gut microbiota by communicating directly with the bone marrow immune cells. The brain, therefore, can change our gut microbiota indirectly by talking to the bone.

Fewer Inflammatory Cells Based on our experiments, we observed that fewer inflammatory cells were present in the circulation of mice that received the special bone marrow replacement than in those that didn’t.

This means there are fewer immune cells able to infiltrate the gut and influence the bacterial environment.

Thus, by suppressing the communication between the brain and the bone marrow, we observed a muted inflammatory response in the gut and a consequent shift toward a “healthier,” more diverse microbiome.

The microbiota in the gut play a crucial role in the health of the immune system.

This may also be protective against weight gain, due to the very important role that both microbiota and the immune system play in obesity.

The Chicken or the Egg This finding may also have implications in immune diseases as well as treatments either resulting in or employing immunosuppression. Such treatments may affect the gut microbiota, which in turn may cause unwanted effects in the body, including those associated with digestive and mental-health conditions.

In the context of cardiovascular disease, this muted inflammatory response appears to be beneficial, as it leads to beneficial lowering of blood pressure in our experimental mice.

Most interestingly, a link between gut microbiota and our mental health has recently become clearer. In particular, some have suggested that gut microbiota influence the stress and anxiety pathways in the brain in a way that can alter mood and behavior both positively and negatively, giving a whole new meaning to the term “gut feeling.”

This could soon lead to a new class of drugs, called psychobiotics.

Much like the chicken-or-the-egg scenario, however, this complex interplay warrants further investigation to fully understand the consequences (or benefits) of perturbing one single component of the gut microbiota. This understanding is essential if we are to fully harness the power of manipulation of gut microbiota in health and disease without negative side effects.

Jasenka Zubcevic Assistant Professor of Physiological Sciences jasenkaz@ufl.edu

Christopher Martyniuk Associate Professor of Toxicology cmartyn@ufl.edu

A version of this column originally appeared in The Conversation, an online service that provides a vehicle for academics to address issues of the day and share their research. To read more columns by UF faculty, visit http://theconversation.com/institutions/university-of-florida E xplore 43

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University of Florida faculty, students and staff joined millions of other people across the country for the Great American Eclipse on Aug. 21. Hundreds turned out to view the eclipse at the UF teaching observatory, while many astronomy department faculty traveled to locations along the path of totality to observe the rare astronomical event.